Park Sculptures

Latitude: 41.1602
Longitude: -8.658922

Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen

Plantoir, 2001

Stainless steel, aluminium, fibreglass, acrylic enamel

729 x 135 x 145 cm

Ed. 2/3

Coll. Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Acquisition with funds donated by Joao Rendeiro, EU funds and funds from Fundação de Serralves 2002

Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, Sweden, 1929 −New York, 2022) and Coosje van Bruggen (Groningen, The Netherlands, 1942 — Los Angeles, EUA, 2009) settled in New York in 1978. From 1976, they worked together on the creation of large-scale urban sculptures. PLANTOIR is one of the public site sculptures developed by this artistic team: giant, colourful sculptures, whose forms the artists glean from the most common objects of everyday life, which are installed in public spaces in articulation or contrast with their context. Seeking a form specifically designed for a garden setting, the artists developed the idea of the shovel until it reached its final shape as a curved ‘blade’, undulated on the outside and smooth on the inside, with its tip partly buried in the ground, giving the whole sculpture a directional force towards the ground, as if it was indeed being dug by the object. Removed from its original context, and with its massive change in scale, this familiar object gains a strange quality. The place chosen for the work’s installation allows it to be seen from three different perspectives: the pathway that encircles the Museum building; the Serralves Villa; and the street outside.

PLANTOIR was installed in the Serralves Park for the exhibition Through Liquidambar Lane: Sculpture in the Park, as part of Porto 2001: European Capital of Culture.